The NBA Draft Lottery has been the subject of many debates over the past few seasons. It has been an especially common topic of conversation due to the strategy used by the Philadelphia 76ers to continuously get top draft picks and build from the ground up.
As a result of this strategy, there have been many discussions of reform ranging from evening the odds between all lottery teams to creating a cyclical wheel to reward teams with the first overall pick. None of these proposals have come to fruition and it appears that no changes will be coming soon.
This is at least the mentality possessed by NBA senior vice president of basketball operations, Kiki Vandeweghe who spoke about the topic with Mark Medina of the LA Daily News:
“Nothing recently. I don’t think I see anything imminent. A year and a half ago, there was a lot of momentum for change. We brought some thoughts to the Board of Governors. The majority of the owners were in favor of change. But a change really takes a super majority. So we barely missed that. I don’t know what has happened in between that. We’ve focused on different areas. I would assume it hasn’t really changed that much.”
Vandeweghe goes on to note that several owners did not want to make changes as they were waiting to see how the league would be affected by the impending monumental cap rises. That certainly makes sense considering team building strategies will change immensely with more available money.
It is interesting, however, that there seems to be no ongoing discussions about lottery reform. Considering the league’s hardened stance on the Sixers that resulted in major front office changes, it seems apparent that the NBA is not in favor of abusing the lottery structure in the way it believed the 76ers had.
Vandeghewe is adamant that the lottery structure does not “incentivize losing” and that it is merely intended to help teams with losing records get on track. But in its current format, the lottery does create an incentive to lose more games and have better odds at getting star players in the draft. One can argue about the merits of tanking and whether or not it is beneficial for individual teams and the league as a whole, but one cannot argue that it happens as a result of the lottery structure.
There seem to several ideas floating around about what can be changed in this regard, but none of them are without their flaws. This, to me, is the biggest obstacle in changing the system for the NBA Draft Lottery and it appears that it is nowhere close to happening.
